The Tung Chih Emperor died surrounded by the Imperial Family and the Senior Counselors of the Manchu Dynasty, who had known for several weeks that their sovereign must soon mount the Heavenly Dragon after living on earth for less than nineteen years. Though his strength was already sapped by dissipation and by the harlot’s plum-flower poison, he had rallied briefly against the further affliction of smallpox. However, his end was manifestly close when he suffered a sudden relapse. The Mandate of Heaven would soon pass to a new sovereign.
Afterward, the Empress Dowagers wept. Despite their grief, his uncles were abstracted. They feared this death would precipitate a grave crisis. Both Prince Kung, the sixth son of the Tao Kwang Emperor, who was the deceased Emperor’s grandfather, and Prince Chün, the seventh son of the Tao Kwang Emperor, were preoccupied by their own sons’ claims to the Imperial succession. The lesser Imperial Princes and the Grand Chancellors, as well as the Senior Ministers and the Senior Censors of the Great Pure Dynasty, were equally uneasy. The decisions to be made this night would determine not only the future of the Manchu Empire but their own fate.
Only the Baronet Jung Lu, General-Commandant of both the Peking Gendarmerie and the Peking Field Force, wore the face of conventional sorrow. His mind was easy, for his troops were already executing the precise commands of his Imperial mistress Yehenala. The Baronet was not enthusiastic about collaborating with the powerful units of the Army of Huai that the Mandarin Li Hung-chang, Viceroy of the Metropolitan Provinces, had dispatched to the Northern Capital when the death of the Son of Heaven was obviously imminent. However, those reinforcements would be useful, perhaps decisive, while their presence in Peking further demonstrated his mistress’s foresight.
The Imperial Guard would assuredly rally to Yehenala in any crisis. The guardsmen loved the junior Empress Dowager for her lavish presents, which filled the purses of troopers as well as generals, while their chivalry was touched by her fragile beauty. Nonetheless, the Guard was too enmeshed in palace intrigue to be absolutely reliable—and too familiar to the courtiers to intimidate them effectively. Besides, the Imperial Guards were the troops of the Dynasty, not uniquely Yehenala’s own, while the forces of the Baronet and the Mandarin were solely obedient to her will. In any event, she planned to avoid a crisis.
As thorough as she was decisive, Yehenala had not only summoned reinforcements, but had already deployed them in overwhelming force. The same brain that had outwitted the usurpers led by Prince Yee and his dupe Prince Cheng some thirteen years earlier was again working to preserve the Sacred Dynasty. Yehenala’s intelligence and Yehenala’s resolution, not Prince Kung’s, had crushed that conspiracy. Besides, her brother-in-law, the Senior Grand Chancellor, was unlikely to support her tonight.
The Empress Aluta, widowed a few months before her twentieth birthday, now sobbed alone by the Tung Chih Emperor’s bier. The granddaughter of the treacherous Prince Cheng was oblivious to the swearing of the eunuchs who squabbled over the late Emperor’s personal belongings. In her desolation, she did not even hear the consoling murmurs of her ladies-in-waiting. Except for those few personal attendants, the bereaved Empress was alone beside her husband’s gorgeously attired corpse.
At half-past the double-hour of the dog, not quite a full European hour since the last breath expired from the Emperor’s lungs, the other actors in the death scene had already withdrawn. A Grand Conclave of Imperial Princes, Grand Chancellors, and Senior Ministers of the Manchu Dynasty was summoned by Yehenala, who had with Niuhura again been invested with the authority of a Regent, this time by her dying son.
Though the Tung Chih Emperor had mounted the Dragon, the people of the Northern Capital did not hail a new Emperor. His subjects did not know of his death, and he had designated no successor. No throngs cried: “Ten thousand years have passed! Hail the new Lord of Ten Thousand Years!”
Crouched beside her husband’s bier, the Empress Aluta was oblivious to the political impasse. Aside from her wracking grief for the Tung Chih Emperor, whom she alone had loved unselfishly, the widow felt only one other emotion. She was not certain, but she believed she was pregnant. It hardly concerned her that her unborn child would have the strongest claim to the Dragon Throne if it were a boy. She wept because the child would be fatherless—if she could bring herself to live long enough to bear the unfortunate creature.
“Ten thousand years passed in an instant!” Aluta sobbed to the still figure. “We never dreamed it would be so short, My Lord. I should have been kinder to you. I should have curbed my wicked tongue. Ten thousand years are already gone!”
The greedy eunuchs did not hear her plaints, and her young ladies-in-waiting instinctively drew back from the Empress’s passionate grief. Her ungovernable sorrow transcended the lamentations expected of all bereft wives; it was the insupportable desolation of a widow who had profoundly loved her husband. Deprived at once of her beloved and the purpose of her existence, she keened with the abandon of a woman who could not conceive of tomorrow’s ever coming. There could be no tomorrow for her. Not daring to touch the cold hand that had caressed her, the Empress Aluta wept alone.
The sandstorm wailed outside the green-tiled and vermilion-columned façade of the Yang Hsin Tien. That name dedicated the Hall of Ceremony just south of Yehenala’s Six Western Palaces in the Forbidden City to the development of the intellectual faculties and the elevation of the moral faculties. Some foreign Sinologues, presumptuous in their limited knowledge, called it the Hall of Mental Cultivation, which was not wholly inadequate. Others called it the Palace Where the Heart Is Nourished, which was simply ridiculous, though Yang Hsin did mean literally, though misleadingly, nurturing the heart. A little knowledge could be totally deceptive, reflected the muscular officer who wore the uniform of the Army of Huai with the leopard of a major general on his tunic. Besides, the deliberations of the Grand Council would be neither intellectually cultivated nor morally elevated tonight.
Despite the portentous events in train around him, David Lee’s wry humor was not subdued. Neither was his capacity for wonder. He marveled that circumstances had made him a major participant in the selection of the next Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty.
His function had been strictly prescribed when he left Tientsin with the crack battalions of the Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s Army of Huai. Unless matters began to go wrong, he was not to interfere, but was to allow the troop commander to follow the instructions of the Empress Dowager. If the plan faltered, he was to take command and act as he believed best.
The torches lighting the forecourt of the Palace of Intellectual Cultivation and Moral Elevation rattled in their iron brackets as the gusts struck them. Their glare was obscured by the miniature whirlwinds of ochre dust swirling on the marble terrace. The gale storming out of the steppes of Central Asia through the passes of Manchuria and over the Great Wall to harry the Northern Capital cloaked the stars and hurled gouts of sand into the faces of the soldiers surrounding the palace. The mid-January night was achingly cold and cavernously dark in the Forbidden City.
David pulled his fur-lined cloak around himself and shouted to the Baronet Jung Lu over the screaming of the wind. The General-Commandant nodded and summoned a messenger. A few minutes later, the watch fires ringing the Palace flared high as the soldiers poured oil on their flames. Above all, the troops were meant to be seen. The menace of the halberds and spears glinting in the hands of the sinisterly hooded infantrymen must awe every member of the Grand Council. The counselors had already seen the long rifle barrels and the gaping cannon muzzles that commanded the approaches to the Imperial City.
When the last of the twenty-five Princes and Mandarins entered the hall, David Lee and the Baronet Jung Lu followed. Behind them marched units of the Peking Field Force and the Army of Huai numbering almost a hundred. Within the palace dedicated to the higher virtues of peace, the cold, metallic reality of power must dominate the will of the conclave. The great doors clanged shut, and other platoons took station outside the p
ortals. They were charged to prevent any interference with the deliberations of the Grand Council—and to prevent any counselor’s leaving before the council had made the decision required by the Empress Dowager.
The troops deployed in the Forbidden City were, David knew, the visible cutting edge of the tens of thousands of armed men mustered throughout the Metropolitan Provinces to support Yehenala. As the Mandarin had observed when giving David his orders, she was the best simulacrum of a man the effete Manchu race could now produce. Despite her obduracy and her ignorance, she at least dimly perceived the direction in which the Great Empire must move. Since she was the best—indeed the only—tool they could use to shape a powerful and independent China, they must support her.
“Chien lu chih chiung!” his chief had said of Prince Kung: “The Kweichou donkey has reached the end of his tether.” The folk saying referred to the tale of a donkey in rugged Kweichou Province, which frightened off a marauding tiger by braying and kicking—until the tiger realized the noise and fury were no threat to itself and devoured the donkey.
The Mandarin was bitter at the Imperial Prince who was the chief official of the Empire. He still resented Prince Kung’s repudiation of their well-wrought plan to divert Yehenala’s energies to the reconstruction of the Summer Palaces and simultaneously engage the Tung Chih Emperor’s enthusiasm in order to wean him from the dissipation that was killing him.
Well, the Emperor was dead, and Yehenala was resurgent. Tonight she would play the tiger to Prince Kung’s donkey.
General the Baronet Jung Lu and temporary Major General David Lee took their stations at the entrance to the council chamber. Their squads of troopers armed with rifles, swords, and revolvers, Yehenala had already explained reasonably, were present to ensure that the deliberations of the conclave would not be interrupted. But the counselors knew the soldiers were the spearhead of the great army she had mobilized throughout North China.
The ebony thrones of the Empress Dowagers faced each other beneath the carved green-and-red squares of the ceiling, which framed an embossed and gilded dome. Panels of olive-green gauze fringed with Imperial yellow hung from the painted beams before the throne to honor the convention that the Dowagers “administered the government behind the screen.” But the panels were not lowered to conceal their faces. Yehenala was determined to dominate the Grand Conclave by sheer personal force as much as armed force.
Court etiquette, however, required Niuhura to open the conclave. While the senior Empress Dowager spoke, Prince Kung, the Chief Grand Chancellor, was surprisingly quiescent. He studied his hands, which were clenched on his knees, as if the outcome were no particular concern of his.
“We have summoned this Grand Conclave tonight because We and our younger sister, the junior Empress Dowager, consider the selection of the next Emperor a matter of extreme urgency,” Niuhura declared in her high, sweet voice. “In times of peril and disorder like those that now …”
Despite that routinely portentous introduction, the twenty-five grandees who sat between the Empress Dowagers knew there were only three candidates for elevation to the Dragon Throne. The most suitable by the most orthodox interpretation of Sacred Dynastic Law was Pu Lun, a great-grandson of the Tao Kwang Emperor. Since that infant was a member of the generation of the Imperial Family that followed the deceased Tung Chih Emperor, he could, as a collateral descendant, offer the Ancestral Sacrifices essential to ensure the tranquillity of that restless soul. The other candidates were tangentially eligible: the adolescent son of Prince Kung; and Yehenala’s nephew, the three-and-a-half-year-old son of Prince Chün. Both those Princes were, however, grandsons of the Tao Kwang Emperor, like the Tung Chih Emperor himself. Since they belonged to the same generation as the deceased Emperor, they could not perform the Rites of Filial Piety for their first cousin.
That apparently theological provision, David Lee reflected, was actually quite pragmatic. It was intended to ensure that the Dragon Throne did not pass from an elder brother to a brother or a first cousin who was almost as old, since youthful vigor was desirable at the beginning of a new reign. It further deterred princes of the same generation from assassinating the sovereign. The rule simultaneously expressed profound reverence for Heaven and intelligent distrust for men.
Niuhura concluded her remarks. As always Prince Kung’s ally, the senior Empress Dowager proposed the selection of the Chief Grand Chancellor’s son despite his formal disability. Yehenala frowned. An Emperor who was almost of age to rule would be a catastrophe at this critical moment in the Dynasty’s history. The Empire must be directed by mature adults seasoned by great experience, not by a raw youth.
She frowned, although Prince Kung protested, as he was in honor bound to protest, that his son was unworthy of the Dragon Throne. The infant Pu Lun, he contended, was the only qualified candidate because only a prince of his generation could offer sacrifices to the spirit of the deceased Tung Chih Emperor.
“Not suitable at all!” Yehenala intervened. “Pu Lun is the son of the son of an adopted son of the Tao Kwang Emperor. There exists no precedent whatsoever for placing upon the Dragon Throne a child who is not of the direct Imperial blood line, but only the descendant of an adopted son.”
“Majesty, a valid precedent exists,” Prince Kung improvised. “Think of the Cheng Tung Emperor of the Ming Dynasty.”
“And think also of the Ching Tai Emperor of the Ming, who was the same man,” Yehenala sneered. “That is a pernicious precedent. His reign was not only filled with disasters but was interrupted by a year’s captivity among the Mongols. He spent almost seven years incarcerated within the Forbidden City before he won back the throne from his younger brother, who usurped power while he was a prisoner of war. You may, perhaps, recall that he then took the new reign name, becoming the Ching Tai Emperor. Do you actually want to bring disaster on our Dynasty, Kung?”
David Lee smiled to himself when Prince Kung was so swiftly impaled upon his own contrived precedent. His smile broadened when he considered Yehenala’s almost equally specious riposte. He coughed and raised his hand to conceal his disrespectful amusement.
Yehenala had naturally not volunteered the further information that the reign of that Ming Emperor was blighted at its inception. When he ascended the Dragon Throne as a child, his grandmother had ruled as Empress Dowager Regent—in violation of that Dynasty’s precedents. Apparently ignorant of that episode in the history of the Chinese dynasty that had preceded their own, none of the Grand Counselors attacked Yehenala’s vulnerability. Perhaps they were not ignorant but did not dare attack her directly.
Prince Kung was conspicuously silent. He had known he was speaking pro forma, just as he had spoken pro forma when he argued against the elevation of his own son, who was unquestionably the most suitable candidate. His head cocked to one side, he glanced without hope at the great plaque on the wall, which exhorted: CHUNG CHENG JEN HO—JUSTICE, BENEVOLENCE, AND HARMONY.
“It is Our opinion that only one candidate is qualified both by Heaven’s approbation and the exigencies of human affairs,” Yehenala continued. “We cannot spare the services of Prince Kung. If his son, who is a worthy lad, were selected, the most capable counselor We possess would be forced to retire from public affairs. Since a father cannot kowtow to his own son, Prince Kung would have to withdraw from the service of the Dynasty. We esteem Prince Chün as highly, but he is ill. He has confided to Us that he wishes to withdraw from active political life.”
Prince Chün looked up in mild surprise. He had not been feeling well, it was true, but he had not until that moment known that he wished to retire.
“We therefore propose Tsai Tien, the son of Prince Chün.” Yehenala looked sharply at Niuhura. “With the assent of the senior Empress Dowager, the Grand Conclave will now vote.”
The twenty-five Grand Counselors glanced from Niuhura’s resigned expression to Yehenala’s imperious stare before regarding the plaque that exhorted them to practice justice, benevolence, and harmony. Th
eir eyes turned finally to the armed troops at the door.
The vote was slow and not entirely to Yehenala’s satisfaction. Despite the menace of the soldiers, seven counselors, led by Prince Chün and Prince Kung, voted for Pu Lun, the only candidate of the appropriate generation. Three voted for Prince Kung’s adolescent son. The remaining fifteen haltingly cast their ballots for Prince Tsai Tien, Prince Chün’s three-and-a-half-year-old son, who was Yehenala’s nephew.
Smiling demurely in her triumph, the junior Empress Dowager congratulated the conclave on its wise selection. She then declared that she would adopt the new Emperor as her own son, so that Prince Chün’s services would not be lost to the Dynasty, an action she could equally have taken on Prince Kung’s behalf. Moreover, the new Emperor’s first-born son would be posthumously adopted by the Tung Chih Emperor, whose soul would be at peace when sacrifices were offered by that filial descendant. Adoption was quite acceptable to Yehenala, David Lee reflected, when it suited her purposes.
The Baronet Jung Lu slipped out of the palace as soon as the voting was completed. He mounted his horse, and the ready squadron closed around the waiting Imperial-yellow palanquin. Pulling their cloaks around their heads to protect themselves from the driven sand, the cavalrymen trotted through the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City into the Imperial City and passed through the Gate of Heavenly Peace into the Tartar City. Buffeted by the wind in the deserted streets of the Northern Capital, the cavalcade rode to Prince Chün’s mansion to escort the new Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty to the Dragon Throne.
“We would suggest, Elder Sister, that Prince Kung, the best loved uncle of the former Emperor, is the most fitting person to take charge of the obsequies for Our beloved son.” Yehenala spoke directly to Niuhura. “We cannot think of a more capable man to discharge that duty. It may, also, help assuage his grief.”
That sacred duty, David Lee mused, would also keep Prince Kung out of the way while the infant Emperor was consecrated.
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